Mesh networks may be deployed to support the needs of municipalities and public safety and other groups of users that use a network to stay in contact. Members of the mesh network must be able to perform authentication, authorization and key management in order to maintain the integrity, confidentiality and availability of the mesh. Some current security schemes include pairwise shared secrets, shared secrets with a key server, certificates and key pairs, and group key. In a pairwise shared secret scheme, each pair of mesh participants (peers) shares a secret, which does not scale well. For shared secrets using a key server, each mesh participant shares a secret with a key server, which facilitates key exchange and authentication between mesh participants (for example Kerberos, Authorization, Authentication and Accounting “AAA” employ such as scheme). Shared secrets with a key server depend on the accessibility of the key server and therefore they can fail if the key server is not available for an period of time that exceeds the lifetime of cached shared secrets. For certificates and key pairs, each mesh participant is provisioned with a certificate and key pair allowing mesh participants to authenticate with each other; however, this solution can have a negative impact on performance and battery life, and may require deployment and management of some level of a public key infrastructure (asymmetric cryptography solutions such as elliptic curve cryptography “ECC” or “Rivest-Shamir-Adleman RSA” are examples of certificate and public key systems). A group key system involves all mesh nodes sharing the same key, which can allow any member of the mesh network to impersonate any other member without collusion, and revocation requires a complete rekey.